Mother’s Day Thoughts

Today is my first Mother’s Day as an official, bonafide mom.  Naturally enough, I’ve spent a lot of the last year thinking about the kind of mom I want to be.  And there’s really only one answer:  one like my own.

Of course, I didn’t always know how good I had it.  Case in point: when I was twelve, I wasn’t allowed to see PG-13 movies.  My mom was all like, “Are you thirteen?  No.”  It was either G or PG for me, and nothing else (Hello, seven viewings of The Little Mermaid!).

Naturally, this left out a lot of the stuff my friends wanted to see.  It didn’t make me a pariah or anything, but I gather that it was something of a burden to attend the theater with me around this time. On one particular occasion, I wound up at a friend’s slumber party, where the evening’s entertainment was a video her mom had rented.  A PG-13 video.

Reader, I did not know what to do.  I didn’t want to spoil the party for host and guests alike.  So I just sat there and guiltily watched the movie.  Later, I told my mom about it, and she said that I should have just told the host’s mom that I wasn’t allowed to watch it.

This seemed wildly unreasonable to me at the time.  I’ll be honest:  it kinda still does.

But now that I’m an adult, I find it impossible to separate this sort of  strict adherence to rules—which I found so irritating—from the strongly moral upbringing my mother gave me—something I value more and more the older I get.  I had no clue, as a kid, of exactly what I had in my mom.  I didn’t get how much value she was giving me, or the fact that the kind of person she was would make me the kind of person I can honestly say I’m happy to be.

And now that I have a daughter of my own, I have some idea of how hard she worked at it.  Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!  I love you.